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Early diagnosis of mental disorders and intervention can facilitate the prevention of severe injuries and the improvement of treatment results. Using social media and pre-trained language models, this study explores how user-generated data can be used to predict mental disorder symptoms. Our study compares four different BERT models of Hugging Face with standard machine learning techniques used in automatic depression diagnosis in recent literature. The results show that new models outperform the previous approach with an accuracy rate of up to 97%. Analyzing the results while complementing past findings, we find that even tiny amounts of data (like users' bio descriptions) have the potential to predict mental disorders. We conclude that social media data is an excellent source of mental health screening, and pre-trained models can effectively automate this critical task., Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures

Mental disorders such as depression and suicidal ideation are hazardous, affecting more than 300 million people over the world. However, on social media, mental disorder symptoms can be observed, and automated approaches are increasingly capable of detecting them. The considerable number of social media users and the tremendous quantity of user-generated data on social platforms provide a unique opportunity for researchers to distinguish patterns that correlate with mental status. This research offers a roadmap for analysis, where mental state detection can be based on machine learning techniques. We describe the common approaches for predicting and identifying the disorder using user-generated content. This research is organized according to the data collection, feature extraction, and prediction algorithms. Furthermore, we review several recent studies conducted to explore different features of candidate profiles and their analytical methods. Following, we debate various aspects of the development of experimental auto-detection frameworks for identifying users who suffer from disorders, and we conclude with a discussion of future trends. The introduced methods can help complement screening procedures, identify at-risk people through social media monitoring on a large scale, and make disorders easier to treat in the future.